What I Know About Honey

How can we not deal with our own experience! Even if we try to ignore it, to presume to be involved with areas outside of our personal experience, we are in fact working through our superego's integration of personal experience with mental awareness and learned knowledge. That is how I view honey. Was it the nectar of the gods? Were the gods giant bee lovers making a beeline for our bees honey? What do I as an astute observer of the human and, oftentimes, non human, condition know about honey? Why would you as a potential reader want to know what I know about honey? Because honey is the nectar of the gods and its qualities are not that hidden and are always interesting. Just for now consider this old, old line from a song, long passed into the category of jingles,"Be my little honey, and love me all the time." Oh, what aphrodisiac qualities that little line connotes.

I was first introduced to honey on the island of Simi, my birthplace, of which I am a well- qualified expert as is every Simian born there. Just ask us. On Simi, honey is of two varieties, lately. When I was first introduced to honey, it was from my uncle Basil who kept beehives on the harbor of Panormitis, directly behind, in the second mountain range. His home was built by my great grandfather Michael and was meant to be used by shepherds tending one of his herds. Since Basil was his oldest son, he was given that home and all of the property that came with it. Basil also built a new addition to house his mother, my grandmother when she passed the age of 90.

In one of my many visits to my barva (uncle), he cut honey for me. The ambrosia of the gods was not overly exaggerated. The honey was made by bees that had access to the entire mountain range behind Panormiti. The combs were substantial of heavy depth and texture and the bee beds were a miracle to gaze on and actually a treat worth its weight in gold. Now, there is another honey, from sugar fed bees, and to tell you the truth, it tastes like the honey found in America with just a hint of its former godly enticing quality.

I do want to say that his offering of honey did make me love him. And I will always love him although he has passed. I, coincidentally, subsequently married a man named Basil. He, too, was an afficianodo of honey and ordered pollen pellets that health food stores offer to improve a male's libido. Personally, I don't think he took them seriously. But, as a Greek, too, although not from Simi, he like other Greeks have pretentions of knowing about honey, which is I tell you a god ordered product of Simi.

On cold evenings, my mother would make fan fried cakes and douse them in a mixture of sugar, water and honey, boiled and cooled. This particular treat is often times made in America but lacking the texture of my mother's. Here and in Greece, they are called loukoumades. Loukoumades without honey are not worth the donot. And, when you see the smiling faces of our Greek ladies Philoptochos societies as they unashamedly proffer the honey laden aphrodisiac to unsuspecting gullible Americans, you get just a wee bit of the overwhelmingly bond that occurred between me and my Barva Basil many years ago on a mystical mountain top.